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20140429 – Perfect Moments

Searching For … Making More

I was sitting in my office this morning, editing and contemplating a number of professional documents soon to be published when I sat back for a moment and looked around, just to clear my head. I realized that I was sitting smack in the middle of thousands of life’s perfect moments. My Mother-in-law’s lifetime collection of family photos (about seven file boxes) sits in the middle of my office floor waiting for a time when D and I can sort and organize them all. That will be a huge, but I hope very pleasurable, investment of our time somewhere down the road. We will be searching for all those perfect moments buried in that collection and savoring them as we ask about or remember, chronicle, and catalogue each one worth keeping in the family history.

At the same time that task distresses me because I think I’d really rather be making more perfect moments. In fact I often feel like I’m running out of time to experience new perfect moments. Each day, month, or year seems to fly by even faster than the one before. When you’re twenty something one year is a pretty long time in your total life. When you’re sixty something one year is a quick flash, not much more than a blink of an eye.

A friend and former co-worker of mine passed away last Thursday from colon cancer. He was only 48 years old. He loved life, his wife, and his children, and he was engaged in living fully each moment. He was always moving, always doing, always planning. He was a larger than life character in many ways, and he impacted the lives of so many more people than he would ever know. I can only imagine how many of life’s perfect moments he had captured and stored in that big heart of his, and how many more he could have made if only he hadn’t run out of time.

None of us knows how much time we have. We could be gone tomorrow, or even this afternoon. I guess maybe that’s why I feel like I’m running out of time.

So what are these perfect moments? They’re those times in your life when you are totally engaged and the memory is indelibly etched in your brain and on your heart. Like the family vacation we took to Colorado in 1998; I still remember nearly every day of that twelve day trip. Or the evening romp in a little sunset cove on the Garden Peninsula of Michigan’s UP back in the summer of 1991 with our two young at the time children.

Some of them you may have captured in photos or videos, but some of them you may have captured only in your head and heart. No matter, they’re the times that fill you up, make you happy, and keep you going. And I want to make some more, a lot more, before I go.